Lena Waithe Covers Vanity Fair: "This Changes Everything"

Lena Waithe is out here living her BEST life! Last week we found out that Lena was featured on the cover of Vanity Fair Magazine! The popular publication did a full spread on the young creative featuring a number of intimate photos of Lena in her home. Amazing right?

Famed photographer Annie Leibovitz did a great job capturing Lena in her natural element. The interview conducted by Vanity Fair was raw and honest giving readers a chance to get better acquainted with Waithe. Check out a few excerpts from the interview below.

“Here’s the irony of it all,” she says after the conversation gets going. “I don’t need an Emmy to tell me to go to work. I’ve been working. I’ve beenwriting, I’ve been developing, I’ve been putting pieces together and I’m bullets, you know what I’m saying?”

“How has the Emmy changed me? It got me all these meetings that I go in and say I’m too busy to work with you—you should have hollered at me. You can take my call when I call you about this black queer writer over here who’s got a dope pilot, or this person over here who’s got really cool ideas, or this actress who’s really amazing but nobody’s seen her.”

“I have a ton of mentees,” she tells me over the phone. “They’re all people of color. Some of them are poor. And I’m just trying to help them learn how to be great writers; and for those that have become really good writers, I help them get representation; and those that have representation, I want to help get them jobs. That to me is a form of activism. I was doing this before Time’s Up was created. I am doing it now. Activism is me paying for a writer to go to a television-writing class.”

Lena Waithe is an inspiration to queer women of color throughout the world. Representation matters and Waithe having the platform to express our stories is revolutionary. Lena, thank you for representing the entity that is Black Queer Women in film. We appreciate you! Make sure you cop your issue of Vanity Fair in store on March 29th.